Director Julie Dash on Daughters of the Dust, Beyoncé, and Why We Need Film Now More Than Ever

“What’s past is prologue,” proclaims a character at the beginning of Julie Dash’s cult classic film Daughters of the Dust, which, when it hit theaters in January 1992, became the first feature by an African-American woman director to earn a mainstream theatrical release in this country. Now that quote—drawn from Shakespeare’s The Tempest—takes on new meaning: In honor of its 25th anniversary, Dash’s film, brought to the attention of a younger generation last year when Beyoncé repurposed its low-country gothic aesthetic in Lemonade, has been newly restored and rereleased. It opens this weekend at New York City’s Film Forum, with a national rollout to follow.

Dash’s story concerns the fictional Peazant family, a clan of Gullah-Geechees, patois-speaking descendants of slaves who live in isolation on the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, keeping the rituals and customs of West Africa alive decades after their ancestors crossed the Atlantic in chains. Daughters of the Dust is set in 1902 on the island of Dawtuh and depicts a day in the life of the Peazants as they gather to face a crossroads: The younger generation is preparing to make the journey to the mainland, readying to leave behind both the place that’s become their ancestral home and their matriarch, Nana Peazant, keeper of the old ways, who insists on staying behind.

The New York Times, reviewing the movie when it first came out, called it “a film of spellbinding visual beauty,” and Dash a “strikingly original filmmaker.” When it played at Sundance, Daughters of the Dust took home the prize for best cinematography for the lens work of Arthur Jafa, then Dash’s husband. (You may know the name: He’s director of photography on the new Solange videos.)

The pleasures of Daughters of the Dust are largely sensual: Its characters squabble, grieve, and negotiate their relationships to past and future. But long stretches of footage are devoted simply to watching them bathe in the lush natural beauty they’re about to forsake for the fantasy of a land of milk and honey up north. Dressed in their Sunday best, they arrange themselves against the beaches and swamps of Dawtuh like the subjects of a painting: Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte transplanted to mosquito-ridden, sunbaked low country. (That impression hit home when I did a close read of the film’s credits: Kerry James Marshall, the figurative painter currently showing at New York City’s Met Breuer, was Dash’s production designer.)

In the years between _Daughters of the Dust’_s first run and its second, Dash has taught at Morehouse College, directed television movies—most notably the 2002 biopic The Rosa Parks Story on CBS—and made industrial films and commercials for the likes of Coca-Cola and GMC. She’s currently working on a documentary about the late culinary anthropologist and NPR correspondent Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, whose 1970 cookbook/memoir, Vibration Cooking: Or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, helped inspire the director to make Daughters of the Dust in the first place. (Smart-Grosvenor also appeared in the film, and was a consultant on set.)

Dash may have broken ground back in 1992, but she hasn’t, she told me when we sat down to chat earlier this week, had many opportunities to make another theatrical feature. We chatted about why that is, how the rerelease of Daughters of the Dust came about (thanks, Bey!), and what film can do to help in the dark days of Donald Trump’s presidency.

It’s been 25 years. Did you ever think you’d still be talking about this movie?No, not at all. Or that it would be released? That’s crazy! I remember when they mentioned this: [I was like], like Lawrence of Arabia or something?

So how did the rerelease come about?I think the rerelease idea came about after [Beyoncé made] Lemonade. We had already worked on scanning the negative for the Blu-ray, to convert the film from the 35mm print to the digital space. While we were doing that, all of a sudden this thing called Lemonade came about, and everyone was like, “What?” Everyone was like, “Have you seen Lemonade?”

I read a quote of yours in the Village Voice. You said: “Whenever I do a film, it has to take us one step further to making the world safe for everyone.” This is a moment when the world is suddenly feeling a lot less safe for a lot of people. What can film do to help?Film can be that balm of Gilead. Film can be that prescription for many ills of the world. Just like years ago, when Lenin said film is the most powerful mechanism of the 20th century. They certainly knew that you could turn a whole generation. You don’t need to fight wars anymore; just create a series of films that move and motivate and resonate with people and you could change a situation.

Propaganda film is not always a bad thing. It can be used in a bad way, but if we go back to the films made during World War II, they were propaganda films to give the American people hope. There were lots of musicals and comedies. Today, films like The Big Short explained things to a lot of people who didn’t understand what was happening. Or last year’s 99 Homes. Or Spotlight.

There will be a ton of films being made about this election, on television as well as feature films. People are going to learn about the hypnotic effect, the brainwashing effect, of repeated slurs made against certain candidates that were totally effective. And then the false news stories. Americans are so educated and swift they didn’t even realize how gullible we are, susceptible to all these false news feeds, false websites, podcasts, to candidates who could say just about anything, about anyone.

I doubt you anticipated that the rerelease of your film would open into this mess.No.

Is there a silver lining? Does the film speak to this moment?I guess that’s for history to say. I can’t be that brazen and bold.

Do you think the film resonates as much as it did in 1991?I hope it speaks to a younger generation of people who have never seen it before, and for the most part, who have never heard of it. I’m just eager to see how they feel about it, what they have to say.

And hopefully [it will] motivate them in some kind of great way: They can say, “Oh, this film is not linear.” It’s like, “Whoa, maybe I can do that too? Let me try something like it.” In film school, they tell you, you cannot write a film narrated by two people. And I did. Even knowing the film teachers would go crazy on me. But hey, maybe there’s a way of making a film [narrated by] three people. You never know until you try and see how it works out.

This is a film about the legacy of slavery. In the past 25 years, do you think we’ve made any strides toward attempting to contend with that history in this country? We just opened a major museum about African-American history, but we also just elected Donald Trump. It’s very hard to understand where we’re at.It’s a very uncomfortable history for everyone, black and white. The further we get away from it, there are two choices: one, to completely ignore it and act like it just happened to be there; or two, to jump in headfirst and find out the real psychology behind it. What’s the economic foundation that caused this to happen, caused it to persist for so long? It was business. But after it was abolished, then it became racial. Because there was anger: “Who’s going to bring in my crops? Those people over there.” So racial conflict was constructed in this country, and it came about during Reconstruction.

Did you see Ava DuVernay’s documentary, 13th?Yes, I did. It’s foundational. It’s a must-see film. And I think it’s going to explain a lot of things that may be happening in this coming year, with the prison industrial complex growing. People who may be considered illegals may find their way there rather than being deported. That’s the fear. I’m just speculating.

Your film is about a history that I knew nothing about. You’ve said in the past that this history is also something that most African-Americans know little about. These traditions exist in the culture, but they’re sublimated; nobody remembers the roots. You grew up in Queens, New York, far from the Sea Islands.Long Island City! Right over the 59th Street bridge.

What sparked your interest in the Geechee-Gullah people?My relatives. In our visits down to Charleston every summer, I’d listen to relatives, speaking Gullah dialects, not really understanding what that was. Nobody explained it to me. I found out on my own. When I got to UCLA and I was able to do research, it was like, “Oh, this is fascinating stuff that was discovered in the 1930s, and we’re just hearing about it?”

After this film, you did a lot of things. Television movies. Industrial films. Why focus on those?While I was doing that, I was pitching ideas to studios, to mini majors, to the majors, to cable networks. Nothing ever came of it.

Do you feel the industry has changed? If you came out with Daughters of the Dust now, and it got the kind of attention it got in 1992, it seems that you might have more opportunities than you got back then.Yeah, 25 years later. We shall see. People say, “Oh, it’s racism, right?” It’s racism and gender issues equally. You cannot deny that that’s what it was. When we were standing onstage at Sundance, and we won best cinematography, and [Richard] Linklater was standing there, all these people said, “What! Really?”

The movies about slavery that have come out lately, the big blockbuster movies, are largely about the horror of that experience. Your movie skirts that.It’s after. It’s the first adult freeborn African-Americans.

Yes, this transitional moment. But it’s about the legacy of slavery. What do you think about how the African-American historical experience gets depicted in film?Well, things are changing. You have the new Birth of a Nation. But prior to that? It’s one of the reasons I did Daughters of the Dust the way it was done. To show that we had authentic lives that were just as compelling as the lives that we usually see on-screen.

You want to go to a movie and feel good about things. You want to go to a movie and recognize people from your community, or from your family, or anything. And that wasn’t happening with me prior to this. It was just, go to a movie and watch and, gotcha, roger that. But there was no connection.